Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Arthur Raper, January
30, 1974. Interview B-0009-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007)

Title of series: Series B. Individual Biographies. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (B-0009-2)

Author: Jacquelyn Hall

Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Arthur Raper, January
30, 1974. Interview B-0009-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007)

Title of series: Series B. Individual Biographies. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (B-0009-2)

Author: Arthur Raper

Description: 117 Mb

Description: 37 p.

Note:
Interview conducted on January 30, 1974, by Jacquelyn
Hall; recorded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Note:
Transcribed by Joe Jaros.

Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series B. Individual Biographies, Manuscripts Department,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

Editorial practicesAn audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines.Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references.All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "All em dashes are encoded as —

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JACQUELYN HALL:

…I am writing a dissertation on that subject for Columbia University and
I had the first draft of it completed when I came here in September. My
first reader read it and liked it, I revised it according to his
criticisms and my second reader has just finished reading it. It has to
be finished in just a few weeks and he is not nearly as convinced by it
as my first reader. So, that's what I'm…I'm rushing around doing more
research and trying to meet his…

The first thing I want to ask you is, how extensive an organization was
the ASWPL really? How many members and how active was it? I know
generally the numbers that they claim to have, but I am still not sure
whether to emphasize that it was pretty much a one woman organization
run by Jesse Daniels Ames or to emphasize how many signatures they had
and how extensively they really did reach women missionary societies and
women all over the South. That's kind of a basic, central judgement that
I wish I

Page 2

could come down on.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, O.K. This would be my estimate. There were about a half a dozen
women who worked with Mrs. Ames and worked with her very faithfully.

JACQUELYN HALL:

About half a dozen?

ARTHUR RAPER:

About a half a dozen. And then the others were more or less peripheral,
they came on call and they did what they were asked to do. They… but
then, I think that happens with most organizations.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yeah.

ARTHUR RAPER:

But, there were about a half a dozen. Mrs. Tilly was, I guess, the most
outstanding one and I could dredge up all the other names, but I know
about a half a dozen that were very active and they were responsive and
they were on call and it wasn't a matter of her deciding something and
then telling them what she had done. They, it was pretty much a
committee process.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Uh-huh. How many people on the average would attend annual meetings?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I couldn't tell you.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You spoke at some of them.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I spoke at… I have records of having spoke to two of them. I have notes
on what I said and since I talked with you, I had that sort of in the
back of my mind and looking out for it when I was going through some
papers the other day. And I know I talked to the group

Page 3

two or three other times in addition to that. But these two times, I
have notes on what I said.

JACQUELYN HALL:

I have minutes of one of the minutes that you spoke to. Minutes on
your…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Do you remember what I was talking about?

JACQUELYN HALL:

You were talking about, the general subject they were trying to deal with
was whether to concentrate on mob violence or to begin trying to talk
about legal lynchings and the prosecutions of the courts.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And you gave a really excellent speech about the complexities, I mean
about the legal oppression of blacks. But, even though you were working
in the CIC offices as research director, you didn't have too much
contact with the ongoing activities of the ASWPL. Was it really that
autonomous?

ARTHUR RAPER:

It was fairly autonomous. That's the way Alexander worked. He let me do
about the way I wanted to do. He didn't have me under his thumb. I hope
I did what he wanted me to do, but I did it more or less on my…well, in
other words, it's, if some program was started, and he said, "Now,
you'll take charge of this." Why, some people don't mean it when they
say that, but he did. And Mrs. Ames carried this on…oh, he was in and
out from the minutes I'm sure, he was talking now and again. And Mr.
Eleazer did too, to a lesser extent. But,

Page 4

it was
somewhat more separate than it might have been. For the reason that Mrs.
Ames was an excessive feminist and she had a theory that women worked
very differently from the way that men work and of course, this will
turn most men off. They just say, "Well, if that's your way of doing it,
just go on and do it." But, Alexander didn't take that position. I
thought maybe she knew what she was talking about in part, well, she
thought that the women's missionary work and the women's political work
and what not all had to be in a separate compartment. That it was silly
for a man to try to do anything about a women's organization.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did she think that women…why did she want women to be…I mean, you
could be a feminist and want women to be integrated into male
organizations, or you could be a segregationist…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she wanted them to be integrated out. She wanted them separate.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why was that? Why did she?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know. It was just…some women are that way and some women
are not that way. And I usually know when I meet a woman very quickly
which way she is going to expect me to go. And I try to accomodate her,
if there's any reason why I shouldn't…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, was it partly because that enabled her to exercise leadership. I
mean, it gave her a certain, it gave her a constituency

Page 5

and power over her own organization.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yes, yes, that was clearly part of it.

See, she came there, she had been secretary of the Commission in Texas,
as you know, of the state committee. And then, she came up there because
she had succeeded in a way.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Because she had succeeded?

ARTHUR RAPER:

She had succeeded in Texas and she came over to the central Interracial
Commission office. And, well, she in some ways looked upon the
Interracial Commission as something she was going to take over
sometime.

JACQUELYN HALL:

She wanted to take over the whole thing?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, yes. She had an inclination in that direction. I think that if
you'll look around, you'll find that most people around here have a
notion that maybe they'll come into the leadership. These things are
placed so if that does happen, why they are there when the door is open.
Well, she did that and a little beyond that I think. See, when Alexander
went to Washington, I think that she had the definite feeling that she
should have been put in charge of the Commission. But, she wasn't.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Who was really in charge of it while he was gone?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, all of us, and nobody.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But you were more closely in touch with Alexander, weren't you?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I was closer in touch with Alexander than Mrs. Ames was.

Page 6

Partly because of this sort of pushy way that she
had in meetings and office work and all that. I was, well, I worked very
closely with it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

This will really get into the basic problem that I have…it's this. I
think, I have gone through all of her public papers, I've gone through
many of her private family papers and journals and interviewed her
daughter and friends of hers and I have a pretty good sense, in a way,
of what this woman was like, the complex motives that she had. And yet,
this is something that my second reader objects to about my dissertation
and I don't think that it's altogether justified. I think it's sort of
simple-minded. He wants to know, he says that I am ambivalent about her,
sometimes I portray her as a…you know, "do you like her or not?" That's
a question he asked me. Whereas I don't think that's really, you know,
that's not what I'm trying to say in the end. Either "Yes, I admire her,
she's a wonderful person," or "Jesse had all these weaknesses and
faults,". I think that people are very complicated and yet I agree with
him finally that I have not been able to portray her very clearly. What
was she like? Can you give me some sort of, you know, specific
ideas…

ARTHUR RAPER:

I will say this. That anybody who portrayed her as I knew her, because
that's all I can say, as I knew her…would not come out with too
attractive a character.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is that right?

ARTHUR RAPER:

That's correct. Now, after I talked with you, no, it wasn't

Page 7

you, after I talked with Miss Thrasher, I got to thinking
about this. And when I was writing up these Southern notes which I bored
you all to death with, but then, you might find them more interesting
than you think. I wrote up about six pages on Mrs. Ames in the framework
that Miss Thrasher had raised that you was writing your dissertation on.
And, "did I know Jesse Daniel Ames?" So, if you don't mind, I'll just…it
may be better the way I wrote it than I state it. But, it was along
these lines. That, I thought Mrs. Ames did a marvelous job in organizing
the women and she did that and she had them coming there, she had them
geared right straight to the point, namely that lynchings do not protect
Southern white women. And that was a very significant point and that's
the one she drove on and she kept her eyes on the real point. Now, she
could do that after we had done this tremendous amount of research at
Tuskegee Institute and after we had made these first case studies. She
could then, with security, take the position they took. It couldn't have
been taken until that time without somebody taking pot-shots at it.
Well, as it was, nobody, so far as I know…now, you've been through all
the materials…nobody took pot-shots at them that these dear, white women
didn't know what they were talking about.

JACQUELYN HALL:

A few, small town papers…but, generally…

ARTHUR RAPER:

O.K., O.K. But, generally, it was accepted. And she could

Page 8

do that because of this very solid, careful research that
had been done on this thing. O.K., now, she organized these women. They
did come to Atlanta, they were subject to responding to telephone calls.
She did have about a half a dozen women who were genuinely committed and
available and worked on this thing. Not all of them lived in Atlanta.
But, there was a core there. Now, she did that and she did it remarkably
well.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why was she able to do that so well? Would you say that she was a good
administrator, she was a good organizer? The women did like her, I mean,
or at least, were very loyal to her and very admiring of her. Why is
that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she could do it because she took this lead that resulted in the
organization of these very strong church women's associations. And
particularly the Methodist women's association. The core of it was the
Methodist women.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But, if she was so aggressive in meetings and tended to offend people,
why didn't she offend the women?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she was able to do what she wanted. They were doing what they…she
was doing what they wanted her to do.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Uh-huh. But her personal style was not…

ARTHUR RAPER:

She sensed this thing and she got in front of it, there was a followship
there and she got in front of it. She created it to some extent, but it
was already created. It was there in the women's

Page 9

missionary societies, in some of the studies they'd had, some of the
speaker's they'd had, some of the goals they had set. And it…

JACQUELYN HALL:

This general analysis and the anti-lynching sentiment had already been
developed by the research and by the…

ARTHUR RAPER:

It was being developed, you see. We had already published the initial
finidings, "Impeach Judge Lynch" by the way, and there had been quite a
few press releases, it had been carried pretty widely on the general
situation. And then here was a place now, where the women could do their
thing and Mrs. Ames was a "women-do-their-thing" person. And that was
the kind of person she was. And she did it marvelously. O.K., now that's
number one. Number two: she did the second thing and she did it
superbly, so far as I know. And I had a chance to see it fairly close
range. And that was in her dealing with Lulu, the daughter. Mrs. Ames
told me one morning with tears in her eyes, she said, "Now, I've got to
leave this off," or something-else-something-else, "because Lulu needs
me." She said, "You know, something happened to me some years ago…"
these were not her words, but this was the essence of it… "and it's
indelibly in my make-up. Lulu was very, very sick and nearly died and
they thought she was going to die one day. Lulu thought maybe she was
going to die. And the next morning, when she was past it (whatever it
was may have been pneumonia, I don't know what) then Lulu looked at her
mother," Mrs.

Page 10

Ames says very searchingly, and
says, "Mama, don't you wish I had died last night?" And she says, "No,
dear. I'm glad you lived." O.K., now, so far as I know, her attitude
towards Lulu and her concern about Lulu and her help with Lulu, was
somehow or another geared back to this time when Lulu put her on the
mark.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Uh-huh. When did that happen, that incident?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I don't know if it was…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was she talking about something that was way far in the past? When Lulu
was a tiny child, or…?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, no, no…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Something that was happening right then?

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, it wasn't then, but it was when Lulu was big enough to talk and big
enough to realize that she was a tremendous…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Burden…

ARTHUR RAPER:

…strain and burden to her mother. "Don't you wish I had just died last
night?" Well, perhaps Mrs. Ames had wondered or thought that, I don't
know what, we all are human. But when add it to the child, confronted
her as it were, she literally had to say yes and do yes, because Lulu,
she was a smart kid, she would very readily say, "Well Mother, I thought
you said you wanted, you were glad I lived." O.K., but she did that
insofar as I know, and I know that she did it well, and it wasn't easy.
Because she had these committments and these

Page 11

ideas
and she wanted to stay in the leadership in this position and she did,
but then there was this other thing that she also needed to do and she
needed to do it right because her child had asked her, "Don't you wish I
had died?"

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, how did that personal burden, strain, affect her work, her public
work and her public personality?

ARTHUR RAPER:

May have increased it, may have made it better.

JACQUELYN HALL:

May have made it better?

ARTHUR RAPER:

May have. Because all those women knew that she had Lulu. And in spite of
having Lulu, she did this and most of them, I think, would identify with
her as having this load, and even then, why, she was doing this, well,
"let's cooperate with her, let's help her. If this is the way she wants
to do it, why, let's do it that way. Let's don't put any unnecessary
strain…" I don't know.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you think she…

ARTHUR RAPER:

I'm just rationalizing, reasoning here, but I don't see why it wouldn't
work that way. I think it did work that way.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you think she at all…

ARTHUR RAPER:

As a matter of fact, I think that she exploited it a little bit.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Exploited it a little bit.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I think maybe she did. It certainly would have been in that direction
instead of the other direction.

Page 12

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did she talk a lot about it?

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, she didn't talk much about it, but she knew she had told me this
story. And she didn't need to talk very much about it. We'd already
talked about the basic problem…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right, right.

ARTHUR RAPER:

And she knew that she and Lulu had faced the basic proposition.

So, now, that's number two. Now, number three. Mrs. Ames was, I don't
know why, I never called her Jessie, I always called her Mrs. Ames.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did everybody do this?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Oh, I think we did in the office. I think Eleazer did. Eleazer nearly
hated her.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Oh, is that right?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah. He appreciated what she did, every now and then, but it wasn't
enough to offset his resentment.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, she was pretty scornful of him, too.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she was, I know she was. And she may have been scornful of me, but
I, frankly, I didn't care. I mean, it didn't occur to me to bother about
what she thought about me. I mean, I was interested in what she was
doing and when I could help, I would, but none of that was…I wasn't…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did it bother him so much.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I don't know. He was…his own wife was sort of an Ibsen's

Page 13

Doll's House, not quite, she was a very gracious lady
and a very competent lady, but she always was the gracious hostess and
had everything exactly right. In fact, I met Mrs. Raper in their
house.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Oh, really?

ARTHUR RAPER:

But, he had that attitude towards women. They were to be here and do
these nice things and well, it was sort of an…well, I don't need to
explain that role, because it is very well observed anywhere where you
can walk into a house and in three minutes, you can see whether the wife
is doing anything except taking care of him.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you have a different attitude toward women that enabled you to get
along with Mrs. Ames?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I think maybe I did. I thought my mother was equal to my father and
I thought my sister was equal to me and when we got some children, I
thought my daughter was equal to the boys. I mean, I've never had any
hang-up on that. It was just there, and that was it. You had to have
both of them for the world to go on and that was that. Well, but now,
she had the philosophy that they had done this wonderful thing about
helping prevent some lynchings, and they did. And they had got these
women to stand up on their hind legs and make these statements which
you've read and they called them to the public's attention. But she felt
that lynching and all matters generally was of concern to the local
authorities, to the states, the districts and the counties. It did not
go to the national level. It stopped.

Page 14

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why was she so obsessed with that…

ARTHUR RAPER:

It stopped with the state level.

So, I had my one very serious situation with her, which I never
discussed with her. I never said a word about it. It was when the
Federal Anti-Lynch legislation, the Van Nuys Bill, I forget what the
number of it was. Walter White wanted me to come to Washington and
testify on behalf of it. Did you run into this somewhere?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Uh-huh. I just accidentally came across the hearings themselves and read
them. And read your testimony.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, isn't that a hell of a thing there. All the bic-bic-bic bic…the
record can't show what actually happened.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why, what was it like?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, the record…As a matter of fact, it's not in the transcript of what
happened. Because, it was a tremendously more broken and they actually,
whoever wrote it up, tried to make some sentences out of some of those
things. They were interrupted over and over and over again. But, that
isn't the serious thing. Mr. Connally, when he came in there and looked
at me, he thought that he, on that committee, was representing the
Southern point of view. And the Southern point of view was that "we
didn't want any interferrence with administrative matters in the
Southern states." Particularly on race. O.K. Now, this was his
assumption and this was his operation.

Page 15

And when he
got in there, here was a guy from Atlanta. So, he at once was going to,
somehow or another, get it established that I wasn't a bonafide
Southerner. I had connections outside, or something. There had to be
somehow that you could explain this.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes, you were "under Walter White's influence"?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah, I was "owned" by him, or something else, you know. And by gracious,
the further he went, the further he saw that I was just as Southern as
he was. And then, when he would just be flouncing around. When you read
that again, watch out for this one point, and this one point only, when
he begins to ask me specific questions about specific lynchings at
specific times and all of those lynchings were after the time when I had
quit making case studies of lynchings…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right.

ARTHUR RAPER:

…which Mrs. Ames knew, and she was one of the few people, nobody on that
committee knew it. Tom Connally didn't know it. Tom Connally was in
touch with Mrs. Ames and Mrs. Ames sent those documents up there to him.
"You ask Raper now, when he comes before his committee, you ask him
about the lynchings. See, now, he's an expert on lynchings. He's made
case studies of a hundred lynchings. O.K., ask him about the one that
happened on May 4, 1937 in Danielsville, Georgia", or wherever it
was.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Where the local officials had prevented any action?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah, yeah. "Did I know about that?" "No, Mr. Connally, I didn't

Page 16

know about that. Ask me some questions about these
hundred that I did investigate from 1930 to 1936. Now, ask me about
those, and I can answer you." "No, no. You're an expert on lynching and
this is 1940. I want to know what happened about last year." And he
pulls out another one and pulls out another one and another.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Now, why did she do that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Because she was so intent on maintaining her point of view. that she
would do anything.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did she become…why did her whole justification of her career and her
self image become wrapped up in maintaining this one position…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Because that's the area in which she had had status, that was the area in
which she was somebody. She was nobody at the federal level. She was
somebody when she had to talk to these women in these states and she had
to get in touch with them by telephone or get in touch with them by
telegram and she could do it. But this other she simply could not
weather. In other words, she was big in her area…

JACQUELYN HALL:

She had all kinds of rationalizations.

ARTHUR RAPER:

She was big in her little pond, but she couldn't transcend it. She didn't
transcend it. I suppose that between her and Walter White, I don't know,
but there certainly wasn't any love between them.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right.

Page 17

ARTHUR RAPER:

And Walter wanted me, after she had done this—and it was perfectly clear
what she had done—he wanted me to make a statement about it and I said,
"No, no, I'm not going to do it." He says, "We can put that old bitch in
her place." I said, "No, no, no. We aren't going to do it. I'm not going
to have anything to do with that. And don't you do it either. You've
asked me to come here and I've come. And we saw what happened and it
wasn't what we wanted to happen, but it's what did happen."

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did he use those words?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Oh, something about like that. I mean, it wasn't less than that. Because
he was utterly disgusted to see one of what he looked upon as his prize
witnesses—because I was from the South and the South was without a voice
except for Connally—practically without a voice…in that hearing.

JACQUELYN HALL:

White's career was tied up also in his view of that issue.

ARTHUR RAPER:

White's career was tied up in the federal thing. Hers was tied up in the
local thing and when they came together, I thought I saw both situations
and was trying to cooperate. I would to continue to put the major
emphasis local, but I think also that the other has to be taken into
consideration. And I had seen, practically everywhere I had been, people
who would have been glad to have been asked questions under protection,
who perjured themselves if they didn't answer them correctly, they would
have answered them correctly because, "this is my

Page 18

duty." And they would have done it. But there was no framework in which
they could do it, because these grand juries called them in there and
the judge made all these speeches about what you must do now, and what
you must do…you know, "the law and the sacredness of this and that and
the other." Now, they all knew that the judge didn't mean that. This was
just the ritual that he needed to go through for the record of the
court, in case there was any appeals or anything else. He did this, but
they knew that he didn't mean for them to indict anybody. So, there we
were.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, White did publish that letter that she wrote to Connally. Do you
remember that? In 1940, she wrote a letter to Connally congratulating
him on the success of the filibuster and having defeated the
Anti-Lynching League.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, yes, I know that. But this is right in harmony with what I knew her
to be and what I knew she did. And this was in harmony with sending that
stuff up there. Matter of fact, I know when the fellow came to the door,
I'm not sure who it was, I'm not sure but that it was Governor Rivers
that brought those sheets of paper to him…when he switched from this…He
was just bouncing around with all sorts of crazy questions, but then all
of a sudden, here you were just right square on the track of "now this
specific lynching at this specific place and this specific time, how
about that Mr. Expert?"

JACQUELYN HALL:

She was criticized so heavily for her stand and at the end of the
forties, she had very few supporters.

Page 19

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I know, I know.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But she…Did that not bother her?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she was determined.

Look at the letter, I haven't seen the letter to Connally, but this is
exactly what I would expect. I mean, if there wasn't a letter like that
somewhere, I'd be surprised.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right, right.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I'd like to see the one that he wrote back to her and thanked her.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right. I looked, audited his papers in the Library of Congress somewhat,
looking for correspondence between the two of them. Specifically around
this hearing that you're talking about, you know, to see if there was
any exchange between them after he used her information, and couldn't
find any.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know, maybe there wasn't any.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Or he may not have kept it.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I've thought about that a great deal. It was impossible for him to have
had the details on that, except out of our office.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Sure. Why did you not even say anything to her about that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I didn't need to. She knew that I knew it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And she felt completely justified?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know whether she did or not. But, I was, about that time, a
little after that, busy with Myrdal and with Greene County and I was
busy doing what I wanted to do and I thought it was

Page 20

cheap, so it was utterly inexcusable. But she had done it, and she
hadn't done me the courtesy of saying "I disagree with you and if I can,
I'm going to poke through your testimony." I could wish she had, but she
elected never to say a word about it and I never did. Never did say a
word about it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, let me ask you this, still along the lines of the women's work.
It's clear that she and Alexander did not get along from the very
beginning. Don't you think that's true?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah, I know that's true.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And I tried to deal with that a little bit, but the problem is that I
only have her side of that. All the comments about the relationship are
from her. Now, from what I know of her, I can well imagine that Will
Alexander had a good side, had his own side to tell, but I don't know
what it was.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Will Alexander never talked with me about that, but very little. And the
things that he said… [Laughter] …he didn't
need to say much. He knew that I knew. One time, he came in and he
says…I forget exactly how he said it, but I'll try to say it about how
he said it, now. But it's sort of nasty. Well, nasty-nice. You can say
whether that's nice. But he said, "How in the heck do you have a
discussion with a woman when she comes into your office and pushes her
breasts up so forth and you're standing there talking with her, why
she's making herself into a female something or other." He said, "How in
the world

Page 21

do you carry on a serious conference in
this kind of situation?" Well, I mean, he sort of had her in a…well, in
other words, she couldn't do anything, he thought.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did she flaunt her femininity, her sexuality? At the same time that she
tried to…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Not very much. This was just what he said to me one time after she had
been in there and…

JACQUELYN HALL:

But did that ring a bell with you, did you know what he was talking
about, a certain way that she…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Oh yeah, I knew what he was talking about.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But what I'm trying to get, was it something about the way she acted, or
might you have said that about any woman?

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, no, no, no. He wouldn't. He had very great deference and respect for
Mrs. Tilly and a lot of women. No, no, he wasn't anti, he wasn't
anti-woman.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, how did she act? That would lead somebody to describe her like
that.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know anymore than I said.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But, my image of her is sort of contradictory. That on one hand she would
be sort of flaunting and you know, do things that would lead somebody to
say something like that about her. On the other hand, it would be for
her to not be feminine enough, not acting like a woman.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know. I could imagine and rationalize it, but these

Page 22

things happened, that I'm stating. And I guess we
just have to leave it at that. As far as I'm concerned. I don't think
you need to, you can get…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes, I'm the one that's on the spot.

ARTHUR RAPER:

You can get some insights and you can use the rest.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes. I need to be fairer. I mean, I feel fairly objective about it, but I
just don't know…Was it true that he didn't want her to come as director
of women's work in the first place? She felt that that was so, but I
don't…

ARTHUR RAPER:

She may have felt that that was true, but I think that if he hadn't
wanted her, she wouldn't have been there. So far as I know, Alexander
wasn't somebody who just accomodated somebody just because they wanted
to come to Atlanta.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, why did he keep her on, if he disliked her so much.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I haven't said that he disliked her so much. This is yours, and I'm
not saying that it's incorrect, but I don't think that he disliked her
so much. He appreciated the fact that she had gotten these women
together within this "women do their thing", however so much he…in other
words, it was worth it. It maybe wasn't the way he wished it could have
been done.

Now, there was a woman who worked… did you run into the name of Maude
Henderson?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes.

ARTHUR RAPER:

O.K. Maude Henderson was there before…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right.

Page 23

ARTHUR RAPER:

And Maude Henderson lived with Mrs. Raper's parents in Druid Hills. Now,
never anything like this, that I ever heard, and Maude Henderson was
there, just before I came. I think Mrs. Ames was there when I came, in
'26. When did she come?

JACQUELYN HALL:

She came in '29.

ARTHUR RAPER:

She came in '29? Well, I came in '26, so I was there some time before she
was, now that's interesting, I didn't know it. But then, you can't
remember everything.You'll find out later. She came in '29. Came from
Texas. O.K. Mrs. Henderson may have still been there then when I first…I
guess she was. But never a word like that did Alexander ever say about
her. But then she wasn't this driving, she couldn't have set up that
women's association that Mrs. Ames set up. And Alexander knew that.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, what was the difference between Mrs. Tilly and Mrs. Ames that made
Tilly so much more able to get along better with Alexander?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I don't know, she was just…it was personality. She was just a very quiet,
effective…she knew exactly where the sun had come up every morning and
where it was going to go down that night. And she had thought a great
deal about these things, she was utterly committed to the things that
Alexander was talking about and that Mrs. Ames was talking about. That
was the reason that Mrs. Ames could do it, because that were a few women
around her that went at it. Now, some of those women…if I had the list
of the names and tried to

Page 24

remember back then, I
would make some slips like from '26 to '29, but I could pretty well tell
you which of those women had already as it were, received the Holy
Spirit before Mrs. Ames got to working with them. And which ones camein
under her and Mrs. Tilly and these other women, you see. This esprit
d'corps that they developed. In fact, I could pretty well estimate…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, let me ask you this along those lines, if it's true that the basic
research had been done, the Tragedy of Lynching was
published, which pretty much established that…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, it was published in '33….

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes, it was later, that's right…

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yes, it came in '33. We published the Lynchings and What
They Mean, which was a summary of the statistical material that
we had gotten from Tuskegee and something about the cases at the end of
'31. And her organization, when was it set up?

JACQUELYN HALL:

It started in '30.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah. Well, it was set up, see, we started talking about this lynching
study early in 1930. We were already doing case studies and already come
back with them and I had already done the basic research in the files at
Tuskegee. I did it in 1929, maybe the first part of 1930. But, we were
publishing stuff and there were newspaper releases that Eleazer was
putting out—you know, everytime that he could get something—because he
was very much interested in it and doing a good job. But, there would
not have been a women's anti-lynching effort if there hadn't

Page 25

been the Southern Commission on the Study of
Lynching and if we hadn't done this research. Now, you said that it all
came awfully close together. Well, it did and logically, because Mrs.
Ames was there, you say she came in '29, O.K., you're looking for new
fields and new things to do and you've got to Atlanta and here you are
at the central office of the Interracial Commission and it's a pretty
logical thing, I think. I didn't have exactly what those dates were. You
see, I was off on Mrs. Ames, I didn't have it right and missed it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

This is my question, well, two related questions. One big question. Why
did lynching decline? Secondly, how important was the ASWPL really in
the decline of lynching? Among all the different factors that caused its
decline. Was the ASWPL…

ARTHUR RAPER:

The dominant factor?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well…yes.

ARTHUR RAPER:

If you have an inclination sometime, if you want to, I'll show you the
clippings that came out when, I think I have a set of clippings on—I
know I have— that came out when the book came out, but then this is a
little bit after the fact, in terms of her organization. Because that
was '33. Of course, she ran on up towards '40. I don't know, lynching is
related to a thing that I was trying to say last night, near the end of
the session over there. There are periods when combinations of
circumstances make it possible for new things to emerge

Page 26

and then there are periods when you are making progress
even if you just don't lose ground. And we're in one of those now, very
pronouncedly. And lynching…I don't know, I think that the work of the
Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching, plus the work of Mrs.
Ames' group would weigh in there, would weigh in very heavily as one of
the reasons for the decline.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, the research was done, the analysis, the research was done by other
people, but she and her organization spread the word. What was their
validity? That's what I'm trying to get at. If she had not organized
that movement, but the research had been done, so that this general
argument was there, then, what would have happened?

ARTHUR RAPER:

About the same thing. Maybe not quite. It was an additional plus…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, this is a hard question, how do you say how much…

ARTHUR RAPER:

I don't think you can. But the nature of mob violence relates to a whole
bunch of factors and the one thing that came into the situation in 1930,
see, we were going into the Depression and what not, We weren't going
into heydays, we were going into hard days and the lynchings might have
gone up tremendously before you got to '35. And as it was, they
generally stayed below what they had been five years before. And the
thing that came in there was the Southern Commission on the Study of
Lynching and plus Mrs. Ames' work. And that was new.

Page 27

And it simply wasn't respectable to use protection of Southern white
women as a defense for lynching any longer. And Mrs. Ames made a very
real contribution, exactly at that point, as I said when I first started
on it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did you call her "feminist" tin the beginning? Did she call herself
that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah. She just said, now…she hadn't been in Atlanta, whenever it was when
she came…she hadn't been in Atlanta any length of time at all until she
sort of let it be known that she was the person who was heading up the
women and that we didn't know how to work with women and that kind of
thing, you know. Well, it worked with some of the women, and it didn't.
Some didn't say it that way, they didn't think that way and they were
very effective. Mrs. Albright in the Southern Methodist Missionary
Society, she was a little before this. But, she had been a very stable
and sound woman leader in the work of the Interracial Commission. And
she didn't have this "this has to be done that way." She (Mrs. Ames)
came up from Texas, she knew how to work with women and women worked
differently from men, and I mean, well, she just sort of said that and
said it in that tone of voice. Of course, we all heard it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Right. Well, one thing that puzzles me, I have it…she was a feminist
clearly, but she also said very critical things about women.

Page 28

I don't know how much real solidarity she felt
with other women. She seemed to admire men and male qualities,
agressiveness and efficiency and be critical of other women for being
sentimental and you know, those kind of things.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, that was the very thing that Alexander and Eleazer, particularly
Eleazer, sort of turned them off on her. They felt that women should be
delicate, they shouldn't be bossy and loud and coarse. And every now and
then, she'd exhibit all those qualities.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Coarse? Did she curse and use bad language?

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, she'd sort of stomp around.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Who do you know that's like her. How can I get a picture of what she was
like? Did you ever know anybody else that was like that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, Mrs. Ames was one of her own.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you see her in some ways as being like contemporary, very hard line
feminist, you know, in the Women's Liberation Movement. The spokesmen?
Do you think she would have felt sympathetic toward that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

She would have towards women having their own thing. She had a feeling
that there was a mystique about the female species, that was something
transcendent and that you had to know that and be part of that, or you
couldn't do this thing. She had that, and that flattered some women and
they liked it to some extent. But, she didn't do it in this loving
indirect way, she sort of came at you with a wheelbarrow and a
shovel.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did she choose, I know the obvious things, it's just what we

Page 29

were talking about earlier, that she was
successful in this and this was where she could make her mark.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B] [interruption]

ARTHUR RAPER:

…by the men, rationalize pretty much, particularly at the political
level, that this was necessary to protect white women. O.K. now, she's a
white woman.

JACQUELYN HALL:

This is a way that her feminism could come into the racial issue.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Right, right. And it's very much more difficult to work with interracial
relations and affect anything than it is to take one segment and a very
raw and vibrant aspect of it.

This fitted in with her Texas background.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How Texas?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Oh, Texas is the frontier. Texas does have its rowdies, Texas is a
bombast. And if you can lie, if you can brag and tell the truth, "Brag"
says the Texan. If you can't, why brag anyhow. Well, I mean, Texas and
Oklahoma and that whole area, it's just a different kind of world from
what you have in the older Southeast. They have qualities and some of
them are wonderful, but there was a lot of lawlessness and braggadocio
and bigness goes with it. So, she came in with that into this rather, in
some ways with a woman's point of view, particularly the man's attitude
towards the woman, to this woman who was meek, and loving and taking
care of the man and so she walked in and took a look

Page 30

at this and said, "Humm…we'll put in some licks here."

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes… Was she real sensitive, I mean did she put people on the spot for
making remarks about women that she didn't like or if they had a
condescending attitude toward women. Did she put people up against the
wall on the woman issue? Or did she just exude…

ARTHUR RAPER:

She just exuded. No, she never did take me to task and I was trying to
think if I ever heard her take Eleazer to task. I don't think I did.
But, it wasn't that, it was just the attitude, just this and this and
this. If you were going out of a door and the two of you happened to get
there at the same time, she would just…

JACQUELYN HALL:

So, you wouldn't open the door for her?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Just symbolic. She would, the way I'm feeling that is what I'm trying to
say. But, I don't articulate it so that it gets across to anybody. But,
it was not a matter of "now these are the rules and you've got to live
by them with me in here in the office." It wasn't that at all, it was
rather an attitude of, well, this mystique, coming back to that…it's as
close as I can get.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes. That's really interesting.

ARTHUR RAPER:

And we just didn't know anything about it. We weren't part of it. You had
to be part of it, to know anything about it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did she like men?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I really don't know. I don't think she did, very much. I think

Page 31

she liked the masculine, in so far as men are
domineering and what not, I think she liked the qualities of men, but
whether she liked men, I don't know.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What you were saying about the lynching issue versus interracial reform
reminds me of another thing I wanted to ask you. What about the decision
that she made to exclude black women from the women's anti-lynching
organization. Do you remember the controversy around that? I've had a
hard time dealing with that. My sense from going to the records was that
at the time, it was not a big issue, although some people objected to
it, but people who have read my work seem to see that as a big thing,
you know, real significant that she would do that and how can I explain
the exclusion of blacks…

ARTHUR RAPER:

O.K. Let me give you another part of the backdrop in Atlanta. There was
an organization that was called the Association for the Preservation of
the White Race. Did you run into this?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes.

ARTHUR RAPER:

See, this is all white. Now, when they came into this, I remembered some
of those first discussions and this will show in the records, I'm sure
and you're well aware of it. When they first started talking about this
women's anti-lynch business, there were some black women in there. And
then as time went on, it got all white. But, it didn't it started off as
an interracial discussion. See, the Southern

Page 32

Commission for the Study of Lynching was interracial through and
through. Members and research and everything. I don't know all the
rationale that went into theirs. I know that it was never discussed in a
meeting with the Interracial Commission as such. It wasn't discussed at
any annual meeting of…

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, since the interracial aspects of things was so important, why
wasn't that very scandalous? [interruption]

ARTHUR RAPER:

Now, ask your question again. I think it's a good question, but I want to
be sure that I got what you said.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why they excluded black women and how the black people on the
Interracial/Commission felt about that? It evidently was not a big issue
at the time.

ARTHUR RAPER:

It was not a big issue at the time. Now, you could ask me whether Mrs.
Ames was carrying on some other interracial work that involved
Negros…

JACQUELYN HALL:

She was doing that, wasn't she?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yes, but I can't tell you what it was. She wasn't working on, so far as I
can recall, she wasn't working on anything else educational, she wasn't
working on anything that had to do with health, she wasn't working on
anything that had to do with economics or anything that had to do with
welfare. That I remember. So, I don't know what she would have been
doing. This thing just about took up her time and it was, I repeat, so
utterly and crucially to the bull's eye on this thing that

Page 33

had been identified, and they were the people who had the
voice… the white women.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did it have anything to do with her racial attitudes, her attitudes
toward black people? Do you think that she found that a convenient way
to avoid having to work with black women?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I hardly think so. I don't know. I simply…she had her show, as you said.
And she was encouraged to go ahead with this original work. Now, see, I
could imagine this now, now this is imagination. But I could imagine
that she would have felt, "Well, I can go to the sheriff down in Baker
County, Georgia better with an all white group than if I have an
interracial group." I don't know. I don't know if that entered into.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But you yourself weren't critical of the ASWPL for excluding black women?
You didn't think that was a real weakness or an affront to blacks?

ARTHUR RAPER:

I don't recapture now any particular…I seem to remember something of…, as
I'm dwelling on it now, something of the recall of why did we do it this
way, "isn't there some way we can do it and keep them in, because we are
an interracial commission." But there was nothing that came out so that
it was anything like this other stuff that we've talked about here that
was out in the open.

Now, did you run across anything where the Negro women were talking about
this?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well,….

ARTHUR RAPER:

In your letters to her or the letters that she wrote to anybody

Page 34

explaining.

JACQUELYN HALL:

References to it being brought up in annual meeting during the early
thirties when they were organizing and…
[interruption] Well, we've got to close this, but how would
you characterize her political attitudes in comparison to your own and
her racial and political beliefs?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, she was a Texas Democrat. Big D. As was Tom Connally. She was of
the stripe of Tom Connally. I had voted the Socialist ticket back when I
was younger and I had worked with Harry Laedler and Roger Baldwin and
Eliott Pratt. I doubt if she ever voted the Socialist ticket.

JACQUELYN HALL:

She never thought about economic problems and problems of class and…

ARTHUR RAPER:

So far as I know, she didn't, no. But she was somewhat interested in the
work that I was doing in Greene and Macon Counties and the reports that
I was making into the Commission and the things that we were writing.
She was somewhat interested in those, but I don't remember her ever, and
I haven't thought about this until right now, but I don't remember her
ever saying, "Well, it looks like a program should be developed around
this need that you've identified here, these facts that you've got here.
Maybe we could go down there and talk with some people and do something
about it." Nothing like that.

Page 35

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, what about race? Well, with integration for example, was there
differences between the two of you or between her and Will Alexander on
the issue of segregation or on any kind of racial issues? Or do you feel
there was pretty much solidarity of the general attitudes the…

ARTHUR RAPER:

I think she was less inclined to associate with Negros than we were.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is that right?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Yeah.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why is that?

ARTHUR RAPER:

Well, I don't know. Now, you're calling to my attention that this was an
all-white organization…from when?

JACQUELYN HALL:

From the beginning pretty much. I mean, there were black women at the
early meetings, but by the time it was organized in 1931, it was all
white.

ARTHUR RAPER:

I know there were black women at some of those meetings, because I was
there and I know there were blacks there. You know, when you get older,
you find things a little bit suprising. I'm wondering, I would have said
if somebody had asked me if I knew, without any of the background that
you've given me here, because you've looked into that particular thing
more than I have…I just remember what I remember…But I would have said
that I thought Mrs. Ames stayed in touch with Mrs. Moton as long as she
was there and then later with Mrs. Hope and some of the other Negro
women, even while she was doing

Page 36

this with the
white women and had this organization, that she had some of these thing
back here and she was reporting and talking about some of the stuff that
happened over here in this association. Now, that would be what I
assumed happened. I mean, if somebody just stopped me and said, "Hey,
how was that? Was that all white, or was that mixed?" Well, the thrust
of that particular activity was white, but it was, there was back in
here, an interracial group.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And they had joint meetings sometimes. They had black women who would
come to ASWPL annual meetings. There was some crossover like that. Her
daughter told me that she in the end, especially after she got much
older and really was dying, that real hostility toward black people kept
coming out.

ARTHUR RAPER:

Really?

JACQUELYN HALL:

But I don't know, I don't want to make anything of that.

ARTHUR RAPER:

No, let us all die in peace.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Exactly. But, I do have a hard time pinning down, I mean, I'm not
interested in that, when she was older, but in pinning down. I don't
want to call her by a label, you know, was she a liberal or a moderate?
But I do have to make some kind of judgements about where she was in the
political spectrum and she's hard to pin down.

ARTHUR RAPER:

She wasn't among the liberals.

JACQUELYN HALL:

She wasn't.

ARTHUR RAPER:

She was not. She was pretty much a Tom Connally Texas Democrat. And it
doesn't surprise me at all, as I said, that it doesn't surprise

Page 37

me that there was a letter from her to Tom
Connally. It doesn't surprise me at all that you say when she was
getting very old, she got irritated with the Negros. That doesn't
surprise me one single bit. I would have rather expected that it would
come out. But even then, she made her contribution and it was a very
distinctive, definitive one and I hope that you can tell her story.